Moby-Dick

Summary

Moby-Dick is Herman Melville's novel of the whaling voyage of the Pequod and of her captain's pursuit of a great white sperm whale. School Launch points readers to parent-chosen selections, while the library provides the complete text of the Etymology, Extracts, one hundred thirty-five chapters and Epilogue for those who want the whole voyage. The narrator, who asks to be called Ishmael, goes to sea whenever he feels a damp, drizzly November in his soul. In New Bedford he shares a bed at the Spouter-Inn with Queequeg, a tattooed harpooneer from a South Sea island, who becomes his bosom friend; they hear Father Mapple preach on Jonah from a pulpit shaped like a ship's bow, and sail to Nantucket, where they sign aboard the Pequod under the Quaker owners Peleg and Bildad. Captain Ahab does not appear until the ship is well at sea. He stands on an ivory leg made from a whale's jaw, having lost his own to the white whale Moby Dick. On the quarter-deck he nails a gold doubloon to the mainmast as a reward for whoever first sights the whale and binds the crew by oath to hunt him; only the chief mate Starbuck protests that vengeance on a dumb brute is blasphemous. Much of the book then becomes an encyclopedia of whaling, with chapters on the classification of whales, the whale's head, tail and spout, the lowering of boats, the cutting-in and trying-out of blubber, and the meaning of the whale's whiteness, mixed with dramatic scenes and soliloquies. The Pequod meets other ships, asking each whether it has seen the White Whale. The cabin boy Pip, left alone in the ocean after a lowering, is rescued but loses his wits. Queequeg falls ill, has a coffin made, recovers, and the coffin is turned into a life-buoy. Ahab forges a harpoon for Moby Dick, ignores storm and broken instruments, and refuses to help the captain of the Rachel search for his lost son. Off the Equator Ahab finally sights the whale. In a three-day chase Moby Dick smashes the boats, drags Ahab's Parsee harpooneer Fedallah to his death and at last rams and sinks the Pequod; Ahab, fouled in his own harpoon line, is pulled into the sea. Only Ishmael survives, floating on Queequeg's coffin until the Rachel, still searching for her missing children, finds another orphan.

Top Lessons

• The captain who will not turn back

  Ahab's vengeance draws a whole crew to death. Starbuck reminds him that the whale smote from blind instinct and, on the last day, that Moby Dick seeks him not. Melville shows how a commander's private obsession can override duty to those in his charge.

• Friendship across every distance

  Ishmael begins by fearing Queequeg and ends by calling him his bosom friend; Queequeg's coffin saves his life. The friendship of two men of different races, faiths and worlds is the warmest bond in the book.

• Jonah and obedience

  Father Mapple preaches that Jonah fled God's command, was humbled in the whale and then preached truth to the face of falsehood. The sermon sets a standard of obedience and repentance against which Ahab's defiance can be measured.

• Work and wonder

  Melville gives whole chapters to rope, blubber, spouts and skeletons, insisting that hard, dangerous, skilled labor is worthy of an epic. The whaling chapters teach readers to see knowledge and craft as paths to wonder.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Moby-Dick is a central literary study of monomania, a term from early nineteenth-century psychiatry for insanity fixed on a single object while reasoning otherwise remains intact; Ishmael uses it of Ahab repeatedly and has him know that his means are sane and his motive mad. The novel sets Ahab's fixed idea beside the cabin boy Pip's derangement after being abandoned in the open sea, and Ishmael's own opening melancholy, his hypos, for which going to sea is his substitute for pistol and ball. Ahab's amputated leg, the splintering of his ivory limb and the injury it causes, Queequeg's wasting fever, and the comic ship's surgeon Dr Bunger of the Samuel Enderby, who treats a captain's lost arm, give the book a vivid picture of injury and medicine at sea.

• Chapter 1

  Ishmael's hypos and his going to sea as a substitute for pistol and ball.

• Chapter 41

  The history of Ahab's injury and the growth of his monomania during the long voyage home.

• Chapter 93

  Pip is left alone in the sea and goes about the deck thereafter so changed that his shipmates call him mad, though his speech holds strange wisdom.

• Chapter 100

  The Samuel Enderby's Captain Boomer and Dr Bunger describe the loss of his arm to Moby Dick.

• Chapter 106

  Ahab's ivory leg is splintered and its injury to him described.

• Chapter 110

  Queequeg wastes with fever, orders his coffin and recovers.